In practice, this means that if a living person can marry someone who has died, they cannot receive money or property from the deceased. However, you can receive pension and insurance rights, and all children born at the time of marriage or born in utero are considered the legitimate child of the deceased. Otherwise, it is a purely symbolic ceremony, as the living spouse is considered a widow at the time of the ceremony. The France: A Legal Option for Bereaved People and Brides France is the few country where it is explicitly legal for a living person to marry a deceased person. Article 171 of the French Civil Code – the laws governing the country – states that “the President of the Republic may, for serious reasons, authorize the marriage if one of the future spouses has died.” In China, there is a rare tradition called Minghun or ghost marriage. This can be done between two deceased single people[1] or between a deceased person and a living person. The South Korean government has allowed the pregnant bride of late boxer Duk-koo Kim to “comfort” her spirit by marrying her after a deadly fight with Ray Mancini in 1982. And in Germany, Fritz Pfeffer – mentioned in Anne Frank`s diary under the pseudonym “Albert Dussel” – was posthumously married in 1950 to Charlotta Kaletta, with whom he had lived before going into hiding and eventually dying in a concentration camp. To be eligible, convincing evidence must be provided that the deceased intended to marry him during her lifetime. For example, Magali Jaskiewicz`s request was accepted in 2009 after she pointed out that her fiancé had already arranged a preliminary wedding date at the local town hall, just two days before her death in a car accident (moreover, she had already bought her dress). Posthumous marriages continue to be granted in France, usually in heartbreaking circumstances.
In 2009, Magali Jaskiewicz, 26, married her late fiancé and father of their two children, Jonathan George, who died in a car accident at the age of 25, two days after asking him to marry him. In China, India, Africa, Japan and Indonesia, phantom marriages are often concluded at the request of the spirit of the deceased. In Ghost Marriages Among the Singapore Chinese: A Further Note, Marjorie Topley tells the story of a 14-year-old Cantonese boy who died. A month later, he appeared to his mother in a dream and said he wanted to marry a girl who had recently died in Ipoh, Perak. The son did not reveal his name; Her mother used a Cantonese spiritual medium and “through her, the boy gave the girl`s name as well as her place of birth and age, as well as details of her horoscope that later proved compatible with his.” Most spiritual marriages are celebrated to unite the spirits of two deceased souls, rather than marrying a deceased person to a living person. While it may seem harmless to perform a post-mortem ritual designed to make two spirits happy, the practice of associating dead men with worthy ghost wives has sometimes led to criminal depravity. In March 2013, four men were sentenced to prison terms in northern China for exhuming the bodies of 10 women and selling them as ghost wives to the families of deceased single men. Women`s bodies were to be buried next to dead men to ensure eternal company. Some women were married vicariously to soldiers who had died a few weeks earlier. This practice has been called posthumous marriage.
Posthumous marriage for civilians began in the 1950s when a dam broke and killed 400 people in Fréjus, France, including a man named André Capra, engaged to Irène Jodart. Jodart asked French President Charles de Gaulle to let her go to his wedding plans, even though her fiancé had died. She enjoyed media support and was allowed to marry her fiancé within months. It is likely that the posthumous marriage (a posthumous marriage) was contracted as an extension of the French proxy marriage. [2] About twenty posthumous marriages are contracted each year in France, and there are examples of similar practices in the United States, South Korea, Germany, South Africa, Sudan and Thailand. In China, however, where ghost marriage was once allowed, the idea of marrying the dead takes on a whole new perspective. The Church`s teaching is not entirely specific about who should be sealed to whom when there are multiple spouses, and the Church allows for sealing whenever there has been a valid marriage between a couple of the opposite sex. One possibility is that no matter how many times a man or woman is sealed, there is only one marriage left in the afterlife. Another possibility is that multiple seals are valid in the next life. The Church does not clearly teach whether polygamous marriages exist in the afterlife or not. It is assumed that proxy arrangements, such as Church proxy baptisms, are available to deceased persons and that deceased persons must accept the ordinance for it to take effect. The LDS Church opposes same-sex marriages and does not celebrate them for living or deceased couples.
According to Chinese custom, eldest sons should marry before their younger brothers. However, if an older brother dies unmarried at a young age, there is a solution that keeps social order intact: phantom marriage. In China and among Chinese in Taiwan and Singapore, ghost marriages are celebrated to address a variety of social and spiritual grievances. This includes, above all, the desire to appease the restless spirits of those who go to the grave without being married. “Spirits with families tend to direct their discontent within the family circle,” writes Diana Martin in Chinese Ghost Marriage, “and this is where phantom marriage comes into play.” Whether it`s a living person or not, ghost marriage isn`t legal in China — NBC News reports it was banned during Chairman Mao`s reign — but the ritual persists, especially in the northern parts of the country.
